1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an optical head which is one component constituting an optical disc drive for collecting and emitting a light beam generated by a light source onto an optical disc to thereby record and reproduce information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, an optical head of an optical disc drive uses one beam to thereby record and reproduce information.
Recently, an optical disc drive is used as an external memory device in a computer. In the computer, it is tried to improve a processing speed and increase an information amount in each program of driving the computer. Thus, an optical disc file composed of an optical disc for recording the information and an optical disc drive for driving the optical disc is required to improve a record density, a data transfer speed and the like.
A method of forming two beam spots and performing the simultaneous recording and reproducing operations by use of the two beam spots to thereby double the transfer speed is considered with regard to the data transfer technique in the above mentioned improvements.
As the technique of forming the two beam spots, there is a method of simply using two optical heads of an optical disc drive each using one beam, to thereby record or reproduce the information. However, the simple utilization of the two optical heads is not desirable from the viewpoint of the miniaturization of the optical disc drive and the reduction of the number of the parts.